I'm entering the Mayor's Short Story Challenge (A small local thing. $50 book voucher for the winner, $1000 to the winning school.) with this piece, and I plan to win. I'm confident - borderline arrogant - that I'll win for my age group, maybe overall, because I've looked over previous winners and I didn't like them. But if you can help me improve it, that would be nice.

If I could make a suggestion here, it would be some of the Saxon descriptions of weapons. I know you want to show off your knowledge, but it seems rather excessive. My greatest problem with the story, however, is its ending- if you can call it that. It's incredibly unsatisfying, and the ending point seems altogether arbitrary. I also don't quite understand how it's possible for the man's daughter to tell him to run in the beginning, him running as fast as he can before her, and still somehow finding her dead and her killer gone before him.

- Cut down on the Saxon and medieval terminology. That's easily done.
- Clarify the internal logic in the beginning.
- Spice up the ending. I'm actually unsure of how to do that, but I'll figure something out.